How social media platforms contributed to the local news apocalypse

*Social media is the snow plow while local news is the reporter.

The main premise in last week’s article about how Facebook wants to revitalize local news was that social media platforms contributed to the decimation of local news. And many of you wanted to know, how do we know this to be true?

This is like asking how do we know that Auburn was robbed in the 2019 NCAA Men’s Basketball final four? All you have to do is open your eyes.

In all seriousness, there are three main reasons:

1) Digital Content Explosion

Across the board, the amount of data being created is at its highest point in human history (2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day). What makes this even crazier is that over 90% of data generated in human history was created within the PAST 2 YEARS!

Record levels of Tweets, Facebook posts, Snapchats, Instagrams, Youtube videos, etc. continue to be published each day. And due to the highly addictive nature of social media and corporations’ continued adoption of the space, we can expect this number to grow.

The above doesn’t take into account the television/film industry explosion that includes Netflix, AT&T-Time Warner, Amazon, Disney, Hulu, and now Apple spending billions annually on new content.

Netflix itself plans to increase its 2019 spending by ~25% to $15B, and BMO Capital Markets analyst Daniel Salmon anticipates Netflix’s content spending will hit $17.8 billion in 2020. These are CRAZY numbers.

For context, as of 4/9/19, Snapchat’s market capitalization is $16.3B. Basically, Netflix is spending as much on content as Snapchat’s entire market value…

What about music, podcasts, audio books, newsletters (like this one)? So. Much. Content.

Are we in a content bubble? Maybe…But as of 2019, content is king and all these media companies will continue to pour resources into the area to secure their future.

Though slightly outdated, the chart below is highly informative:

Every minute in 2017, society released a seemingly infinite amount of content. And we can expect that these figures will rise for the foreseeable future.

Out of ALL this content, which types ‘won’? And by ‘won’ I mean went viral…As you can imagine, the provocative, misleading, false, biased, and click-bait content did.

In the book Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now, Alan Rusbridger references several studies showing that the ratio of ‘real’ news to ‘false’ news was consumed one-to-one during the 2016 US Presidential campaign.

One-to-one! That means that during the 2016 US Presidential campaign, the number of articles read from reputable news outlets was equal to the number of articles read from disreputable (fake, misleading, inaccurate) organizations.

So, how does this content explosion impact local news? Well for one, local news must compete with it. Society’s eyeballs can only focus on so much content. And the choice on whether to focus on a local community story or a cute puppy video is pretty obvious…puppies!

2) Cannibalization of Content

Let’s imagine a scenario where local news reports on a truly emotional story that receives widespread attention. They post the article on their website and the article starts generating clicks.

Unfortunately for local news orgs, national media companies like the New York Times, WSJ, Washington Post & Fox News might read your article, repackage the information, and publish it on their site.

To combat this plagiarism, media companies have historically given credit to the organization who first reported the story. Surely you’ve seen the phrase “as reported by xx”…

How have social media platforms amplified this issue?

When print was the dominant form of media, national news companies would have to wait a full day before reporting about someone else’s story. Nowadays, it can take mere seconds before cannibalization.

And since nationwide papers can report the most engaging and viral stories in real-time, they attract the largest audience, diverting people away from local news towards national news.

Also think about this… Local papers specialize in their immediate area; thus, the stories they can report on are limited to the local populace.

Nationwide papers, by contrast, can report on domestic, international, space, or any kind of news. Their scope of influence is infinite.

3) Profit Entrapment

Sometimes, society likes to believe that the journalism & news professions are born out of moral principles. Sayings like “Democracy Dies in Darkness” or the idea that the media exists to “hold power accountable”, while noble, are not the reason why media companies exist.

The harsh reality to the above philosophy is that media companies exist to make a profit (except for publicly funded non-profits like NPR or PBS). Each company is designed to maximize the return to shareholders. And shareholders have many tools at their disposal to effectuate this strategy such as incentive pay, shareholder activism, the threat of hostile takeovers, etc.

At a simple glance, it may seem like social media has been a net positive for local news outlets — it is now easier than ever to discover and share local stories. And Google and Facebook still contribute some 70 percent of publishers’ referral traffic. However, platforms like Facebook reap the rewards from these media organizations and entrap them within.

As reported in the Washington Post in 2016, 6 in 10 of users will share an article without ever reading it. What!? Now maybe the number of bots skews this statistic (hopefully)…But data is data. And this data-point is scary for obvious reasons.

And what’s even scarier is that I didn’t read the article above. Only the headline…Point proven?

To local news companies, the number of shares, likes, and comments may seem like good measurements to analyze. But this would be wrong and misleading. These stats indicate how well Facebook is doing from YOUR content. Not how you’re doing…

The problem is that Facebook & other social media platforms are the best in the world at keeping YOU engaged in their site. They do their very best to ensure you don’t click an external link, but instead read the headline and below comments to formulate your opinion, and then comment, like, share and repeat. Hence why they have problems recommending conspiracy theories and fake news.

FB’s total 2018 revenue was $55.8B but they finished the year out strong. Quarterly revenue topped $16.6B in Q4 ’18 — which annualized totals $66.4B. Clearly, they capture wealth tremendously well.

What about local news? How well do they do in capturing revenue from social media users?

I’d say not great. At least 36% of the largest newspapers across the United States — as well as at least 23% of the highest-traffic digital-native news outlets — experienced layoffs between January 2017 and April 2018, according to a PEW Research study.

You can make the case that local news companies have done a poor job at adjusting to social media. But I’d retort that social media has done a phenomenal job at harnessing the value of all media for their gain.

To Wrap Up

Surely, based on the above arguments (and others including how the Section 230 ruling allowed social media platforms to defer responsibility for content posted by their users — a ruling which was recently updated), I believe social media companies played a major role in the destruction of local news.

But what does my opinion matter? I’m only one user out of billions. And social media platforms can control and persuade their users based on content moderation.

How do we know this? Well, you’ll have to tune in next week to find out.

Admit it, you’ve missed cliff-hangers…

This article was featured in my newsletter, Media Explained.

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